This one got a little away from me, everyone. I started out just reading articles on the case but then I ended up downloading the entire 300+ page investigative file from the FBI's website and going through it (it was pretty interesting at least!).
Hope you like it!
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Chesterton, IN farmer, George McNathan heard the hum of an airplane motor from the east when he was heading out to his barn at 9:00 pm the evening of October 10, 1933. This wasn't particularly noteworthy -- McNathan was used to living near a flight path -- but he paused to watch the plane for a moment. Suddenly, a ball of flame burst from the middle-rear of the plane, followed by a huge detonation that shook the ground around him. After the blast the plane turned northward before entering a steep dive. It crashed upside down and nose first into the ground, sending a fireball 100 feet in the air.
United Airlines Trip 23 (in the days before flight numbers) was a Boeing 247, the first modern passenger airliner, offering customers a selection of amenities not found on prior airplanes: heat on chilly evenings, snacks, soundproofing in the cabin, a lavatory (photograph of a 247 interior). Structurally innovative, the 247 boasted an all metal body with an aluminum alloy skin, retractable landing gear, an autopilot, inflatable boots to remove ice from wings, and two-way radio, the new airliner was faster than the best military fighter then being flown by the U.S. Army. Collectively, the 247 line had logged over 60,000,000 miles with United Airlines since its debut. This particular plane was less than a year old.
The flight was one of United’s transcontinental routes, flying from Newark, NJ to Oakland, CA, with stops in Cleveland and Chicago. Planes at the time flew at low altitudes (around 1,500 feet) and cabins were unpressurized (an important job for early flight attendants was to make sure people who needed to use the facilities opened the door to the bathroom and not the one to the outside of the plane). Multi-city stops were necessary because fuel capacity and efficiency was insufficient to get across the country in one go.
Before taking off from Newark the plane was given a full pre-flight technical inspection by a team of three mechanics as was standard procedure. Apart from a nail in one of the tires, which was taken off and replaced, the plane was in good working condition. One mechanic noted that the cargo compartment door was ajar, but when he looked inside he saw that the flight attendant’s bags had been stowed inside with nothing else in the cargo hold. He latched the door closed. After porters cleaned the inside of the cabin, washed the windows, and loaded passenger luggage and other necessities, the flight took off a little after 5:00 p.m. with five people on board.
Newark-Cleveland leg:
- Bob Dawson (pilot): Former barnstormer who would go on to be one of United’s top pilots in the 1950s.
- A.T. Ruby (co-pilot), 28: An army and marine corps veteran who first took up aviation while he was a student at the University of Illinois. Ruby had complained to his brother on at least one occasion about being pressured to join the fledgling pilots union.
- Alice Scribner (flight attendant), 26: Daughter of a former Wisconsin State legislator. After graduating from teachers college, Scribner taught school for a year, then became a nurse, both in her home state of Wisconsin. She was a relatively recent hire, lived in Chicago, and planned to marry her fiancé within the year, thus ending any careerwith the airline since flight attendants were required to be single women. The man, another Wisconsin native, was waiting for her in Chicago.
- Dorothy Dwyer (passenger), 25: A last moment addition to the flight from Arlington, MA. She missed her scheduled plane from Boston due to a flat tire in Rhode Island and her connection in Newark due to a flight delay out of Boston. She told the pilot that she was on her way to Reno, NV to visit her sister, but in reality was on her way to marry a man named Theodore/Stanley Baldwin (the papers from the time refer to this man as Theodore, but he’s called Stanley in the official investigative reports), a wealthy former stockbroker originally from Boston, who was newly divorced.
- Emil Smith (passenger), 44: Smith was returning to Chicago after coming to New York to see the first two games of the 1933 World Series between the New York Giants and the Washington Senators. The blue-eyed army veteran had been stationed in the Hawaiian Islands until he was honorably discharged in 1920. After that he’d moved to Chicago to live with an aunt. She owned a small building: an apartment above a grocery store which they owned and ran together; they’d sold the store 3 years prior. As far as anyone knew, Smith didn't work. He was passionate about duck hunting and sport shooting, lived with his aunt because, according to him, his immediate family thought he should work a job instead of going duck hunting all the time. The sale of the business had left him comfortable enough that he didn't seem to have money problems. It was later discovered that he had purchased two life insurance policies for the flight: one prior to leaving Chicago and a second from a kiosk inside his hotel. This was fairly routine thing for passengers in the early days of commercial flying, however, and many such kiosks could be found in hotels and airports. Part money-making gimmick on the part of the airlines and part security blanket. Smith paid $2 (approximately $40 in today’s money) for his second policy with a lifespan of one flight, with benefits paid to his estate in case of death.
Just before boarding, Smith took a pint bottle of liquor, three quarters full, out of his bag and attempted to take a drink. Told he could not drink either in the airport or on the plane, he reluctantly placed the bottle back in the bag. Asking the porters to hold off on loading his bag, Smith left the bag in the waiting room and went to the restroom. When he returned, he removed a cylindrical package, tightly-wrapped in light brown paper. One witness at the airport described the package as being about as long as a pair of “normal sized” tennis shoes and 5” in diameter; a second witness said the package was approximately 8” long and 4” in diameter. One witness thought the package must contain liquor given all the fuss from earlier, but it wasn't the shape of a typical liquor bottle. Smith’s bag was locked in the forward luggage compartment and, after boarding, he placed the mystery package into the cargo net above his head. Due to the light load, all passenger baggage was stored in this forward compartment, crew baggage in the rear.
Smith, friends said, was known to drink, but never to be intoxicated. Dawson, who took time during the flight to visit with his two passengers, said that Smith did not seem as if he’d been drinking, talking and joking with Dawson and the flight attendant, Scribner over the course of the 15 minute interaction.
The Cleveland stop was brief (approximately 20 minutes), but necessary. Dwyer left the cabin while the plane was refueled and a radio check performed. A full mechanical inspection like the one in Newark was neither required nor performed. The night was cool with a raw wind blowing and there was a small bit of friction when Smith initially refused to leave the plane.
“Has he been drinking?” John Halpin, the airline’s passenger agent in Cleveland, asked Scribner. “Why doesn't he want to get off the plane?” Scribner said she didn't believe Smith had been drinking.
Smith eventually did leave the plane, taking his wrapped package with him. He wasn't wearing a coat suitable for the weather and jammed his hands into the pockets of his jacket, securing the package under one arm. Halpern made a point of engaging Smith in a short conversation to see if he could determine whether there was liquor on Smith’s breath, but there was none that Halpern could smell, nor did Smith seem intoxicated based on speech patterns.
A few people joined the flight for the Cleveland-Chicago leg:
- Harold Tarrant (pilot), 25: Tarrant replaced Dawson on the second leg of the trip. A two-year veteran of United who had recently been promoted to pilot, he was the son of a well-to-do Chicago North Shore merchant. Recently married, his wife, Bessie, was waiting for him at the terminal in Chicago.
- H.R. (Warren) Burris (passenger): Worked as a radio operator for United, but flew as a passenger on this particular flight. En route to Chicago for a work assignment. He had come to the company a couple months prior, well recommended from the Department of Commerce. His boss said that Burris had recently experienced some “family difficulties,” but couldn't say what they were.
- Frederick (Irving) Schoendorff (passenger), 28: Manager of the apartments division of R. Cooper, Jr., Inc., electric refrigerators. Schendorff’s wife was scared of air travel so he did not tell her about this flight. The VP of the company described him as affable and well-liked by everyone and his home life as “the happiest.”
At 8:39 pm Ruby radioed that they were flying at 1,500 feet, and they could see two beacon lights ahead. All conditions were good, with a 7,000-ft ceiling, but due to headwinds they were going to be about fifteen minutes late landing in Chicago.
Witnesses who tried to approach the flaming wreck to render what assistance they could reported that the heat was too intense. They also said that they could hear some screams and one even reported seeing movement inside, though both of these events were unlikely given that the plane’s occupants likely died nearly instantaneously. The plane had broken into two parts from the approximate location of the blanket storage area behind the lavatory. The smaller tail section would be found, nearly intact, about half a mile from the main crash site along with the relatively unscathed bodies of Smith and Burris. A coroner later discovered that both men had burst eardrums, but their bodies were not burned. The remainder of the plane had slammed into a patch of woods, mangled by the explosion and fire. The bodies of the crew and other two passengers were found inside, badly burned.
At first, it appeared to be a terrible accident — at a time when airplane crashes were all too common. A fuel leak, possibly. Structural failure also was suspected. Some believed the plane had been struck by lightning, and there was even a theory it had been hit by a meteorite. Officials from United arrived on the scene by 11 pm. State police had already been deployed amidst the front end wreckage and 5 of the 7 bodies had been located and taken away.
But there was no standard procedure for dealing with wreck investigations and many of the locals had already gathered up chunks of plane and scorched blankets for souvenirs. A depression was on, after all, and scrap metal was a valuable commodity. By the next day, most of the plane pieces that could be carried had been removed by souvenir hunters, including one of the propellers and the septic tank for the chemical toilet.
It was the county coroner who first proposed the idea that a bomb, placed somewhere near the lavatory, caused the explosion that ripped the plane in two. Dismissed as far-fetched initially, analysis by Northwestern University’s Crime Detection Laboratory of parts either gathered onsite or returned to authorities by souvenir hunters revealed more about the nature of the explosion. There were puncture holes throughout the remains of the lavatory. Everything in the front of the lavatory was blown forward, everything behind blown backward, and things at the side outward. The fuel tanks, instead of being blown out as they would have been had they been the cause of the explosion, were crushed in.
The laboratory’s conclusion: Flight 23 had been carrying a bomb containing “nitroglycerine, dynamite of high percentage strength, TNT or some similar substance” and that the explosion had occurred in either the upper rear portion of the lavatory compartment or the fore part of the blanket compartment, essentially somewhere in the area where the lavatory met the blanket compartment. Analysis centered on a piece of blanket, part of the plane’s equipment, and several pieces of the metal surface of the plane. These had been pierced many times by small bits of metal. Only a high explosive could produce a force great enough to force metal through metal. The explosive had likely been squirreled away in the blanket compartment (accessed via an opening in the top wall of the toilet: image from the United States Bureau of Investigation (precursor to the modern FBI) investigation file, blanket compartment door is shown open). A manager at the airline’s Newark office said that the blanket compartment would have been filled at a supply depot in Chicago and suggested that an explosive device could have potentially lain undiscovered in the compartment for months if the blankets weren't used in-flight due to the airline’s set schedule for airing them. Adding to the blanket-based mystery: one of the mechanics in Newark reported that he’d inspected the blanket compartment to a certain extent as part of the usual required checks.
From the BOI casefile:
He then inspected the inside of the cabin beginning with the washroom and the blanket compartment. The blankets, he noted, were in the compartment all rolled up. The blanket compartment was filled and he moved the blankets over to one side by sliding his hand behind some of them. He found nothing out of the ordinary in this compartment…. Further inspection was made of the three small compartment adjoining [the] right side of the washroom, the upper compartment containing magazines, the middle one food trays and the lower one had about five extra passenger convenience containers and some sanitary drinking cups.
For reference, the opening from the lavatory into the compartment was approximately 4 inches high and 2 feet deep. The compartment then ran along the length of another storage compartment in the plane, approximately 3.5 feet long. This space was large enough to fit the full complement of 10 blankets and 10 pillows. Flight attendants were also required to perform a check at the beginning of each flight to make sure there was a full supply. While it’s impossible to know whether Scribner performed the required check thoroughly, her status as a fairly new employee may suggest that she’d be more prone to work by the book.
The investigative files also included reports from Underwriters Laboratory and other experts who could find no traces of the actual explosive used. No fragments of a detonating timer or device were found — no wires, clock parts, etc. A gasoline vapor-air explosion was ruled out because gas expands comparatively slowly and would not produce sufficient force to create the shrapnel effect observed by the scientists.
The BOI, was called in. Chicago Bureau Special Agent in Charge Melvin Purvis, who would go on less than two years later to capture the outlaw John Dillinger, poured money and resources into the case. BOI agents conducted countless interviews with everyone in the vicinity of the crash as well as friends and relatives of the passengers and crew.
Given that his behavior with the mysterious package was, honestly, very weird, the BOI first zeroed in on Smith. They traced his calls from his swanky midtown hotel, including several to a woman named Patsy Marshall, who lived at another hotel about a mile away. After first denying that she knew Smith, she eventually admitted that she’d met him several days earlier, at the corner of 45th Street and Broadway. He was lonely in New York and invited her to his hotel room for a drink (perhaps worth noting that Smith had been dating a woman in Chicago named Nellie Rolston for 7 years – according to Rolston they intended to be married but Smith’s family opposed it. She knew nothing about Smith’s trip and hadn't seen him for two weeks prior to his departure for New York). Marshall refused the invitation to drink with Smith, telling the interviewer it was a “flirtation” and that the two of them had spoken for about 15 minutes and exchanged telephone numbers. A man named Art McGinley, sports editor of the Hartford Times, who was registered at the same hotel as Marshall was reported as telephoning Smith and there was record of a call made from his room to the same hotel where Smith was staying (though not Smith’s room particularly), but McGinley denied knowing Smith. Moreover, when Smith checked in, he informed hotel staff that he didn't want to receive messages and that he “would be home to no one,” BUT there was record of two messages received by him from an unknown outside number. BOI tried to track down the callers with no success -- hotel records recorded only the receipt of the messages but not the names or numbers of the callers. A Chicago Tribune reporter later wrote that Smith had made comments about going to New York for a “rum deal” that would set him up for life, but while the BOI made a note to follow up this lead it either couldn't be substantiated or it was dropped.
Something or nothing? McGinley denied knowing Emil Smith but he DID run through a list of a couple other Smiths he knew. While he was in New York covering the World Series for his paper, he received a call from a man named Warner Smith who, according to McGinley, was the manager of the 42nd Street branch of the Travelers Insurance Company. Some of the insurance Emil Smith bought for his flight was also from Travelers Insurance Company, albeit the branch in his hotel, which was on 45th Street. Probably nothing? Travelers is a big company, but the BOI never followed up with Warner Smith or checked McGinley’s story.
Smith was blown out with the back part of the plane despite the fact that his seat was in the front of the aircraft, but it’s entirely possible he either decided to sit elsewhere permanently or temporarily in a plane that wasn't full (the plane had room for 10 passengers, there were only 4 aboard) or he got up to use the lavatory.
Investigators had trouble interviewing Burris’ wife, Helen, who was extremely nervous and became “hysterical” upon mention of her husband’s name (potentially worth noting that this interview was conducted about a year and a half after the accident). The agent decided not to inquire about the “family difficulties” mentioned by Burris’ boss due to what he perceived to be Helen’s delicate mental state. She said that “Burris worshiped his family and that his family worshiped him.”
Agents questioned the first leg’s pilot, Dawson, who was angered by the interrogation and the suggestion that he might be responsible. “You were the only one who was on the plane that night and lived to tell about it. Everyone else died,” Dawson later remembered the FBI agent telling him.
One by one, each person on board was crossed off the suspects list. Interviews with friends and family of passengers and crew revealed they were all “reputable citizens.” None had experience with explosives, and none had any reason to take down a non-military passenger airplane on a routine transcontinental flight. Interviews with twelve passengers who had canceled their reservations on the flight revealed nothing, as did interviews with dozens of others who had flown on the plane for up to two months before the crash. Mechanics on the ground were cleared as well.
The determination that it was sabotage and not mechanical failure or flawed design gave United some breathing space. With the company invested heavily in the 247, the forced grounding of the plane because of design flaws could have killed the airline. The Department of Commerce, Aeronautics Branch, Enforcement Section, issued a report, since misplaced, thrown out, or misfiled in either the Department or the National Archives, that focused on possible structural failure. Those causes were ruled out.
On September 7, 1935, the new special agent in charge of the Chicago office, D. M. Ladd, wrote to J. Edgar Hoover that all leads in connection with the investigation had been “completely exhausted.” He requested permission to consider the case closed, which was granted 20 days later.
Theories
- Mafia: With the destination of Chicago, it was thought that perhaps the explosion was related to some sort of Chicago mafia or New York mafia gangland type activity. No leads could be developed that implicated the mafia kingpins of the day.
- Mafia redux: The Chicago Tribune reported that a mafia member hid the bomb in the storage compartment after taking a flight on the same plane in the days or weeks prior as a way of getting rid of incriminating evidence, never intending it to detonate. Jostling from normal flight turbulence or as a result of blankets being pulled from the compartment caused the device to explode. No supporting evidence was offered for the story.
- Unions: Some theorized that the explosion intended to smear the airline’s reputation and force unionization. However, United was working well and positively with all of it labor unions and workers at that particular time. The pilots union had planned for a strike on October 1 -- the newer Boeing 247s were faster and would reduce their flight hours and thus their pay, but the issue was settled prior to the date when the airline committed to issuing bonuses to cover the pay differential. A Cleveland pilot named Warton Larnod was investigated based on his reported harassment of Ruby to join the union. A far cry from a pro-Union firebrand, Larnod was happy to talk, though expressed confusion about why the BOI would be interested in him. Larnod was in favor of unionization among pilots and mechanics and recalled asking Ruby for his opinion on a flight the two men shared. The crucial difference in recollection came from Larnod’s response to Ruby saying he wasn't in favor of a union: “that’s all I needed to know.” Ruby took the statement as threatening; Larnod said he had only meant it as an end to that particular topic of discussion.
- Smith’s mystery package: The BOI checked to see whether Smith had received the package at his hotel in New York, but he did not, so the package likely something he picked up himself during his stay in New York (a bellboy at his hotel remembered him arriving with only one bag). After the crash remains of the package were found and while the contents were not disclosed, the BOI reported it contained only a “benign object” not associated with the explosion or crash (n.b., I couldn't find this in the official BOI file but the thing is 300+ pages so I might have missed it!). A heavily-damaged rifle found in the crash debris was also determined to have belonged to Smith, who was likely transporting a rifle that he used for sporting purposes only (why didn't the bellboy note the rifle case?). He was scheduled to compete in a shooting contest at the North Shore Gun Club in Chicago a few days following the flight. Perhaps worth noting is that Smith purchased his ticket to Chicago from an airline representative at his hotel the day before the flight, gave his Chicago address, but said that he’d checked out from his New York hotel and therefore could not be reached by telephone. This was a lie, Smith checked out the same day as the flight. A Chicago Tribune reporter contacted the BOI after the crash, offering to exchange information for an opportunity to shadow one of the agents working the provided leads. The BOI declined, but “later learned that the information consisted of possible leads concerning some relatives of Mr. Smith.” The Tribune never developed a story based on the supposed leads and it seems the BOI concluded that the reporter’s story about having any leads was an excuse to get close to the case.
- Theodore/Stanley Baldwin: A Boeing Systems employee (at that time Boeing and United were under the same company umbrella) who happened to be flying with Dwyer’s fiancé from a Reno airport to Chicago a day after the crash struck up a conversation with Baldwin. The witness reported that Baldwin was “hysterical” over the death of his fiancée and that he had been taking morphine and bromide to help deal with it. The employee said Baldwin thought “a bomb had blown up his fiancée’s ship,” a conclusion not reached at that time by investigators. The witness also noted that Baldwin was wearing a large diamond ring and the man hypothesized that he was a gambler from Reno. Questioned by the BOI, Baldwin said that it was possible he’d spoken one-on-one to someone and said that the plane had exploded and that a bomb could have been the cause, but that he’d had no foreknowledge of any bomb. Baldwin and his first wife had been married 10 years, but he’d secured a divorce three months earlier on grounds of desertion. Baldwin had been living in Reno 6 or 7 months, working as a real estate and mining broker.
- Missed target: A tip out of Oklahoma City said the crash was arranged to target Joseph B. Keenan who had traveled the route a couple of days prior. Keenan was a special assistant to the Ohio Attorney General with a particular focus on combating organized crime. In 1933 he was recruited to serve as a Special Assistant at the U.S. Department of Justice to help address organized crime on a national level. Keenan went on to lead prosecutions against “Machine Gun Kelly” and members of the Barker-Karpis gang. The BOI tried unsuccessfully to find the source of the tip.
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At issue here is whether the explosive was on the plane prior to the first leg of the flight or whether one of the passengers or crew brought it aboard. I lean more toward the latter scenario for the following reasons:
- How delicate might a device like this be? What does the fact that they didn't find any parts or residue suggest – does that make it more or less likely that random jostling would have set it off?
- How often/thoroughly was the blanket container really checked? The description that one of the porters gave of feeling around between the blankets suggests to me that it’s very unlikely that an explosive could have been in there undiscovered for multiple days and flights beforehand.
- Were all the passengers truly cleared of suspicion? The BOI seems to put a lot of stock into certain people saying that “so-and-so was a good dude,” even if the person saying it wasn't a close friend or family member. For example, I don’t think a boss is likely to know what’s truly going on inside a given employee’s marriage. The fact that Burris had enough going on at home that his boss was vaguely aware of it suggests to me that it might have been something pretty huge and the fact that the BOI never asked his wife about it seems negligent.
- I don’t want to fall into the trap of being like: Emil Harris was kind of a weird dude who did some odd stuff and lived somewhat unconventionally so therefore he’s guilty! But I have a lot of questions about his finances, his reasons for being in New York, his phone calls in New York, and how much influence his family did/did not have over him.
Sources:
Flight 23 was America’s first air terrorist attack and for 85 years has remained unsolved
United 23 took off from New Jersey 80 years ago; its midair explosion remains a mystery
1933 Crash of United Airlines Trip 23 Boeing 247 NC13304 (original BOI file)
Submitted March 05, 2019 at 10:43PM by SchrodingersCatfight https://ift.tt/2VH0DzT
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